Rejoin the agreeable discussions of world politics

A good piece, trailed in Briefings from Britain today, by R Tombs in Spiked,trying to puzzle out exactly what the case is for Rejoin.

As he notes, the economic arguments during the Referendum were motivated by Operation Fear, and the arguments now seems to depend on dubious comparisons with 'doppelganger' economies (much criticised, including in this blog -- which countries do you compare with the UK? How do you control the other variables like the Crash of 2008, oil price rises, wars, embargoes, Covid and policies like aiming for net zero?).

As a commentary in Briefings... puts it  

the Remain view (also a feature of the BBC documentary) ...[is that].. the years between 2016 and 2026 are abridged: ... there is a straight line from the referendum to soaring debt, poor productivity and border chaos. Remain, in this view, is vindicated. The lockdowns and failures of individual politicians are secondary consequences: Brexit is the first cause of our present woes.   

So what does that leave? Tombs seems to argue towards an autonomy for the political interests of what he comes close to identifying as a ruling class or elite. These are expressed in 'political' and personal terms -- they want to be included in  major political and economic decisions and the UK is no longer a big enough actor on the ''world stage'. First they pinned their hopes in the Commonwealth as a kind of free trade dominion,then the stages of the EU -- the initial Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market etc. They never committed to the ideology of European unification,unlike the political elite in European countries,most of whom had unfortunate pasts to live down and persistent rivalries to manage.

So there still is no strong case for Rejoin, or not one that can have public appeal. It has ideological appeal, but even there it is ill-formed, never quite explicit (it would be laughable if it were made explicit). The most popular aspects of it, like nationalism and patriotism, are self-defeating and anyway better expressed by various emergent right-wing alternatives,not monopolised by the major traditional political parties since the first decade of this century.

To put it bluntly -- what is the appeal of promoting the ideological interests, the wishes to belong, to have seats at various tables, to find a  new role fro themselves, of privileged knobs? 

 

The Briefings team have also produced a book. I have it. I'll deliver some summaries. Meanwhile, buy it on Amazon here 

Brexit: The Facts Strike Back

by Robert Tombs (Author), Graham Gudgin CBE (Author), Nick Busvine (Contributor), & 2 more

 

 

BBC admits Brexit bias but fails to acknowledge its ideology

Briefings for Britain this week contains an article by D Keighley of  News-Watch (mentioned a couple of times in this blog) which has been monitoring BBC output for years and continually argued for the existence of evidence based on various simple measures of bias. They have also been continually dismissed, usually by the BBC loftily claiming that the professional judgement of its broadcasters outweighs any mere academic analysis by outsiders. They are nice people, how can they be biased?

This time it is different (nearly):

On 4 June, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) partially upheld a News-watch complaint about an item broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme on 15 November 2024.  This is the first time that the BBC has formally accepted that one of our complaints about the impartiality of its Brexit coverage was justified. 

BBC Europe correspondent Katya Adler reported that [The Governor of the Bank of England, A Bailey]  had claimed that Brexit was one of the main reasons why the British economy was not performing as well as it could. Two guests were then invited to discuss his allegation: Sir John Gieve, a former deputy governor of the Bank, and Liam Byrne, the Labour MP and chairman of the Business and Trade Select Committee.

Both men broadly accepted Bailey’s diagnosis. The discussion then moved towards the same policy conclusion: Britain should reduce friction with the EU and pursue closer alignment....No guest was present to argue that Britain’s economic difficulties might instead be addressed by using more energetically the freedoms gained through Brexit.

The ECU [Executive Complaints Unit] accepted part of the complaint.... the competing arguments — closer EU alignment or greater exploitation of opportunities outside the EU — were “so clearly a controversial matter” that Today should at least have acknowledged the alternative. Its failure to do so fell below the BBC’s standards of impartiality. 

However, the ECU then defended the BBC against the charge of systematic bias, using an old argument we have seen before, voiced famously by none other than Emily Maitlis:

that Bailey’s diagnosis was broadly correct. This, [the Head of ECU] argued, reflected the predominant view among economists, and he had found no significant [NB] body of opinion maintaining that Brexit’s economic effect so far had been beneficial or even neutral....a BBC spokesman insisted that the BBC itself had “no view” on Brexit’s impact and was merely explaining the economic consensus.

 In response, Keighley points out that:

The BBC says it has no view, while granting one side of a contested argument the status of an authoritative consensus which need not be seriously challenged. That is not neutrality. It is a highly biased  editorial judgement about which claims count as established and which may be treated as marginal.

Brexit is not a controlled experiment. Its economic consequences cannot be isolated with scientific precision from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, energy prices, inflation, interest rates, taxation, regulation, migration, political instability or the decisions of successive British governments. The headline estimates most frequently cited are produced by counterfactual models comparing actual performance with an imagined Britain that remained inside the EU.

Such models may be useful, but they are not observable facts. Their assumptions can be disputed, and they cannot determine how Britain might have performed had governments pursued different tax, energy, regulatory or trade policies after leaving.

Indeed, Sir John Gieve himself acknowledged during the Today discussion that measuring Brexit’s impact was “extremely difficult” and that economic models were not good at measuring large shocks. That caveat ought to have encouraged rigorous questioning. Instead, it was submerged beneath an editorial structure that moved smoothly from “Brexit has caused damage” to “closer alignment is the remedy”....

Keighley gets close to a general understanding of ideology as a whole structure of argument, often not conscious, but assumed as normal judgement: 

skewed framing: the premise chosen for discussion, the credentials accorded to particular sources, the selection of guests, the questions not asked and the range of policy solutions deemed respectable.

 Keighley points out that 'There is, of course,  a substantial alternative argument advanced by rafts of economists'. As I said, in my rebuke to Maitlis, the BBC need  only to have looked at W Keegan in the Guardian, fer Chrissake, let alone edition after edition of Briefings for Brexit as it then was.

There is another disturbing aspect of the case: unexplained delay. Normally, the rules of the BBC complaints process stipulate completion within months...The ECU identified the imbalance only at the point of remedy. It failed to recognise that the diagnosis had already been framed in a manner which disadvantaged the Brexit case.

 Again, a classic procedure -- masterly inaction, characteristic of the whole Professional Managerial Class,usually clearly combined with eventual admissions of personal incompetence, lapses of judgement, and subsequent apology but never recognition of systematic ideology. As Lukacs said, generations ago -- the bourgeoisie literally cannot think of alternatives to their worldviews.

 

 

 

 

Rejoiner hearts leap as King of the North triumphs

Remainer hearts lifted a bit (not too much) as Burnham won a by-election for Labour, because he defeated Reform at least, and has supported Rejoin in the past, although a recent national poll suggests a large minority suspect his integrity despite his local support (most don't know, of course). The Times did its best by publishing photos of him as an effete Cambridge English graduate, years ago, looking like a member of an elite dining club, rather than his current chosen image of hardened Northern son of the soil. He is a Blairite for my money.

D Cummings, by contrast, is usually seen as the wild man of British politics, a driving role behind Brexit as among the most heinous of his crimes. He was an adviser to Boris Johnson once, but was soon deposed. He has remained as a trenchant critic of the British state and its conservatism, and he writes on Substack and elsewhere.

This piece appeared on UnHerd, which is, alas, protected by a subscription barrier. It is typical Cummings prose:

So now [politicians].... don’t want to look at [the real]... questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on [sic] technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market.

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterised by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. 

 

I looked up the item by Draghi in the Corriere della Serra (translation by Google). It is not exactly favourable for Cummings. It does argue that important matters including conflict and technological change are now decided by powerful state systems, not market or economic forces. He has in mind the USA, China and Russia, of course. By comparison, the EU still favours a rather weak and cumbersome state apparatus based on a 'common market'. 

 

While before we relied on markets for the direction of the economy today there are large-scale industrial policies. While before there was compliance with the rules today there is the use of military force and economic power to protect national interests. While before the state saw its powers shrink, all the instruments are now employed in the name of the government of the state.

Europe is poorly equipped in a world where geo-economy, security and stability of sources of supply more than efficiency inspire international trade relations.

 [original spacing and font size  -- sorry --  and emphasis]

That market is still riddled with internal barriers:

European states are about to have a giant military enterprise with 2 trillion euros - including a quarter in Germany - of additional defence expenditures planned between now and 2031. Yet we have internal barriers that are equivalent to a tariff of 64% on machinery and 95% on metals.

Agreement with Cummings so far, but then Draghi argues for the same old option.He is certainly not in favour of national independence. What we ned is -- greater centralisation of 'Europe', especially financial centralisation, the adoption of 'common debt' ( central banking)...  

for example with an agreement on projects of common European interest and with their common funding, an essential condition for achieving the technologically necessary and economically self-sufficient dimension . ...Only forms of common debt can support large-scale European projects that insufficient fragmented national efforts would never be able to implement 

In a way this still supports Cummings,because this was the  issue before and all along.There is no soft form of 'alignment' with the EU. The old 'common market' is indeed dead. It is Europe as a superpower or nothing.